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About a month ago, I wrote in this column about a group of British animal rights activists who employed Nazi imagery in a vicious campaign against a kosher abattoir (slaughterhouse) in London. This, I said, was another example of the Holocaust being used as a stick with which to beat the Jews, by turning their own victimhood on its head.

The last time I wrote about Donald Trump in this column was back in December 2015, when the Republican presidential primary race was in full swing. Then, I voiced concern about what the Middle East policy of a Trump administration might look like, pointing out that his failure to address Iran's hegemonic ambitions, along with his deference to Russian autocrat President Vladimir Putin, was perilously similar to the approach of President Barack Obama—whom the New York billionaire reviles.

In a deeply personal account of the impact of Donald Trump's presidential candidacy upon his network of professional and social relationships, the conservative academic Tom Nichols leveled an eyebrow-raising assertion. "Trump is worse than Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama," Nichols wrote [1] . "Their policies are liberal, even leftist, often motivated by cheap politics, ego, and political grandstanding. But they are policies, understandable as such and opposable by political means."

"It is generally admitted that antisemitism is on the increase, that it has been greatly exacerbated by the war, and that humane and enlightened people are not immune to it. It does not take violent forms (English people are almost invariably gentle and law-abiding), but it is ill-natured enough, and in favourable circumstances it could have political results."

To understand the significance of the newly announced legal challenge against the American Studies Association's academic boycott of Israel, we need to go back around 18 months.

It has been that long since the anti-Zionist fanatic Steven Salaita left the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign under a cloud. Salaita, who teaches American Studies, departed the school following a bitter struggle that resulted in an offer of a tenured professorship being retracted.